8 ms·

I have yet to be told why it is important for there to be as many women in STEM as men apart from statements that I'm sexist for not knowing

tomp 8y ago
Because men and women are equal (so there's no difference whether a scientist is a man or a woman) /s
chimpburger 8y ago
For the same reason its important for there to be as many women in mining, oil rigging, heavy industry, and forestry.
- monochromatic 8y ago
  Don’t forget garbage collection and janitorial.
- jriot 8y ago
  Except there isn't.
- phil248 8y ago
  Are you being facetious? Obviously labor intensive work does not reap the same benefits from diversity of perspectives as scientific or creative fields.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - chimpburger 8y ago
    Are you being facetious? How does science benefit from a diversity of genitalia? I'm not saying women should or shouldn't do this or that.. but the irrational compulsion to force equity between the sexes is stupid. Providing equal opportunity is good. Forcing equal outcome is evil.
    - phil248 8y ago
      I believe what I said was that science benefits from a diversity of "perspectives". But go on, rant against those straw men if it makes you feel better.
      - chimpburger 8y ago
        Gender quota != diversity of perspective
  - tomp 8y ago
    You haven't explained how diversity of sex/gender contributes to diversity of perspectives. Also, are you happy to hire white nationalists and racists in the name of "diversity of perspective"? If not, then you're not being honest in your argument...
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I don't personally think it's necessarily important for there to be "as many women in STEM as men." But I do think those women who want to be there shouldn't be de facto run out by sexist practices. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I don't self identify as a feminist. But, post divorce, I've found that sexism has been a real issue in establishing an adequate income to support myself and my sons. So I think society still has work to do. It's very problematic to deny people a means to support themselves and then act like their poverty is due to laziness or the like. That kind of "fuck you" has been known to foment bloody revolution.
- qaq 8y ago
  Do you think a stay home dad with equal employment gap would have an easier time rejoining a workforce ?
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I have no idea. But I'm willing to guess he faces lower odds of being asked for a date by senior personnel in the better-paid department he would like to work in, thereby de facto closing doors in my face.
    - qaq 8y ago
      I am not trying to argue sexism/bias does not exist but from my experience any gaps in employment are a flag used to filter out candidates so in this particular scenario that might be the main problem to overcome.
    - bitL 8y ago
      That's super disgusting if that happened to you :( Maybe at some point we need to stop interacting in person completely and instead use gender-less avatars with their own voices so that we can bypass both sexual harassment as well as trying to land better positions by our own physical attractiveness.
  - bobwaycott 8y ago
Aloha 8y ago
Because I think it's the only way we have to measure that there are no cultural barriers for women entering STEM professions. I've often theorized that much of the widely talked about pay gap has to do with either professions that women often wish to work in - or that society steers them to - but I dont know enough to know if its personal preference, or sociocultural bias driving personal preference. In the end, pay equality and open doors are important things, and is something we as a society should work on.
- User23 8y ago
  Actually, women are favored for tenure track STEM jobs: https://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/study-women-favored-for-stem-tenure-track-jobs/ https://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/study-women-f... So yes, there is sexism in academic STEM hiring: 2:1 in favor of women.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
Start by not setting up strawman arguments for your conversation partners if you're interested in getting a real answer.
newnewpdro 8y ago
It's not, there's no reason to expect there to be as many women in the workforce as there are men in general. There's an obvious asymmetry which won't go away until men start giving birth. The rational debate is generally surrounding equal opportunity and compensation. Of course there are always going to be quacks pushing the debate in irrational directions however, and it's a trendy topic at the moment.
gboudrias 8y ago
The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. Science as a whole should strive to be as unbiased as possible, as that's the closest we can get to objectivity. The same logic applies to businesses, to reduce the risk of making mistakes that come with echo chambers.
- tomp 8y ago
  Is reducing bias the most important goal? (Definitely not for me. Life today is much better than it was 50 years ago in communist Yugoslavia, despite higher inequality and bias, due to progress in science and business.)
  - kevincrane 8y ago
    Imagine how much more progress we could have had in science and business if we didn't de facto force out so many possible candidates who were interested in the field after they had their first kid.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- zeroname 8y ago
  > The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. That's only true if all biases cancel each other out perfectly.
  - jfrankamp 8y ago
    No, because this isn't a binary result. If group a and b both have bias 1, that bias won't be cancelled. But if they differ on bias 2, the combined group has less bias than a or b while not having 'cancelled all biases perfectly'. Perfection is a false goal while 'lower risk' is attainable and worthwhile.
com2kid 8y ago
Let's say we live in a world (or small town) where there are only 16 software developers, 8 men, 8 women. 4 of the women are amazing top notch engineers, and so are 4 of the men. The other 4 men and 4 women are pretty good, but not nearly as good as the top developers. If a company needs to hire 10 people, and they hire men, they will not be able to fill their entire hiring need. Obviously a silly policy, and it leaves a lot of good talent on the table. So instead, the company hires the best it can. 4 amazing women 4 amazing men 1 average woman 1 average man That is an optimal team given the local talent! But now let's have the company put in some sexist work place policies. Half the woman leave. Now the company is down to 2 amazing women 4 amazing men 1 average woman 1 average man to make up for lost numbers, the company is going to have to hire talent that is not as good as the talent that left! The tl;dr is that discriminatory policies artificially limit the labor pool, reducing the overall efficiency of a company (and the economy of a nation as a whole if looked at broadly enough).
- _ta23 8y ago
  Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50? The other thing is that the labor pool is already too large, lies from the industry notwithstanding.
  - com2kid 8y ago
    > Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50? Discussions about quotas are separate from discussions about how discriminatory practices limit hiring pools, and how discriminatory workplace environments decrease the overall level of talent at an organization. (For what it is worth, the same reasoning being discussed here is why professional sports teams figured out long ago that racism was bad for business.) Mathematically, if there is a labor shortage, then cutting out part of the hiring pool based on criteria that are not correlated with the qualifications of candidates, will always result in worse hiring decisions being made. If there is a surplus of talented labor then whoever is doing the hiring can be pretty much as nasty as they want to be and still form a team of pretty good caliber.
redditmigrant 8y ago
If you agree to the basic principle that scientific ability and thought is equally prevalent amongst men and women, having fewer women scientists means we are not getting and developing the best scientific minds. Having as many women as men also means a you girl doesnt think science is for boys only which again means we potentially miss out on good/great scientific minds purely because they self-select out. So if you are in favor of STEM getting the best STEM minds, its important for STEM fields to reflect that STEM is for everyone. Having as many women as men is a step in that direction.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  We are not getting and developing the best scientific minds anyway. Not by a long way.
- topmonk 8y ago
  IQ tests show there are a greater number of men with very high IQs than women, and scientific ability highly correlates with IQ, so your “basic principle” doesn't hold muster.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    Do you have a source for this? How can we be reasonably certain IQ assessments aren't inherently gender-biased? Is IQ directly-correlated to scientific contribution? Richard Feynman's IQ was famously average though his scientific contributions to society were most certainly not.
    - topmonk 8y ago
      http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students... Richard Feynman is the exception that proves the rule.
perfmode 8y ago
It’s important to minimize barriers to participation.
dgzl 8y ago
From what I understand, if you mix women and men in the workplace then competition between employees goes up, for obvious reasons.
nuna 8y ago
you definitely sound it... its not so much about having the same number as it is about providing the same opportunities. If new moms had the same support, be it from family members and their communities, they would be less likely to leave their positions. Some things that would help in my opinion as a mother: affordable and accessible day care including back up care, at least 12 months maternity leave, flexible work arrangements (time and place), PTO (imagine both parents only have 2 weeks to spend with their kids outside of weekends), extended school and camp programs, affordability of all. I went back to work when babe was 4 months. I have only 2 weeks PTO, there inst even a Christmas shut down, I have no family in the area, the daycare centers around me have 1 year waiting lists and are over $2500/month. I am underpaid. My work is flexible thankfully. I don't blame women who quit.
- belorn 8y ago
  Sweden made a government report on the teaching profession a few years ago and just like male dominated professions they found that the minority gender, men in this case, left the profession in a significant higher rate in ever stage from when they are a student to being a stable employee for decades. While the study did not look at newly parents, I would make the guess a similar effect but likely smaller since day care is paid by the state in Sweden. I like common theories in order to explain similar data, so what theory can we make in order to explain why being a minority gender, for example women in science and men in the teaching profession, both tend to leave their positions in greater rate than the majority gender? A lack of support from family members and communities? I find that possible but a bit grim given how universal gender segregation is with about 90% of all employed here in Sweden.
  - nuna 8y ago
    Interesting, whatever it is society has changed and we need to re-evaluate our culture, community and policies to accommodate
alkibiades 8y ago
as long as there isn’t then people will blindly look at the percentages and say it must be discrimination that causes the disparity
thomasmeeks 8y ago
The answer is a quick Google search away, diversity increases innovation: https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovation https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovati... If you don't agree with that, I'd love to hear why, and why the related studies are false. Can start with this one, which is the first result: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685.8132&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685... There's quite the bibliography to pour through there, though, if you really want to shatter the science behind why diversity is a good thing. Good luck!
- roenxi 8y ago
  The study you linked has nothing to do with gender or diversity w.r.t. minorities. It's subject is economic geography. We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women. The same logic applies to minorities as well, so we can be confident that any process calibrated to finding the best person for the job is going to turn up a diverse workforce. However, once policies designed to enforce diversity come in to play, that correlation will be broken and you just have a sexist/racist/whatever hiring system.
  - horistat 8y ago
    > We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women No, that's a false statement. We cannot remotely think that because it's completely wrong. The percentage of population of a gender has nothing remotely to do with the percentage of women qualified for any particular job.
  - vixen99 8y ago
    No, we can't be 'pretty confident'. Sometimes the 'best' don't want to do the job. 90% of nurses are female (in Sweden where gender equality is a top priority). What would be the motivation to induce or somehow encourage males to take up a career for which they clearly have no particular enthusiasm. I wonder how many males harbour a secret desire to be a nurse but are discouraged by societal norms? Need some amazing evidence for that one.
devwastaken 8y ago
Because humans find reasons to look down on other 'groups' when they know that group is underrepresented, and therefore tergetable. Same as how people will talk shit about others and get reinforcement for it, until that person actually walks in. And because professional careers are a necessary path if we wish to have a 1st world where choice is possible. Without choice, others are deciding what you can do with your life. That's generally what patriarchy refers to, in that women are treated by, overwhelmingly men, who are in positions of power and use that power in a way to suppress that choice. It's not that they do this explicitly because they hate women, many do think that women are just inferior, but many are also making highly calculative reasons. It's a chicken and egg problem. But if we are to say we believe in morality, then it is many times necessary to overcome that problem by force of public acts. Wether it's effective is highly circumstancial.
everdev 8y ago
Equality of outcome is a fool's errand and a quick path to authoritarianism. What we need is equality of opportunity. We don't need to even strive for a 50/50 M/F split in STEM, parenting, dance, healthcare, martial arts, etc. for everything we do in society. The majority of men and women might have very different interests and we want people doing what they're interested in and what gives them joy, not pushing them to do something the majority of their gender isn't usually interested in. But, when it's not close to a 50/50 split it's fair to ask why. Are men and women being given the same opportunity to join and be successful? If it's because men and women on average are different then nothing is wrong. But if it's because men aren't hiring women because of a bias then something is wrong. And historically we've been willing to give special treatment to those who are underrepresented to help correct past biases. So, yes the pendulum might swing from a bias to a quota before it goes back to equality. We see this in college admissions and people are starting to want to swing it back to equality which is fine once the initial biases in the system become rare enough that striving for diversity becomes the biggest bias in the system. Of course this is very difficult to measure and is largely influenced by culture and wether you've historically received preferential or biased treatment.
- 40acres 8y ago
  Equality of opportunity over equality of outcome is such a contrived argument. Equality of opportunity is arguably harder as it implies a just society. What are you willing to give for equality of opportunity? Higher taxes? More liberal zoning? Desegregated busing? Affirmative Action?
  - everdev 8y ago
    Equality of outcome means an external force like the government will step in to correct a situation such that person A gets the same results as person B. That can be income, job opportunities, taxes, etc. and it quickly disincentivizes hard work because the desired outcome has already been decided before you start. For a less sensitive example, imagine how hard football teams would practice if the NFL wanted the equality of outcome with each team winning the Super Bowl every 32 years. The worse my team is the harder the league has to try to make my team win which is great for me but bad for competition. And if I just won, I have no reason to try because the league doesn't want me to keep winning and will do whatever it takes to stop me from hogging all the trophies. Equality of opportunity means an external force will step in to correct a situation to ensure that person A and person B are playing by the same rules. Back to the OC, we should be obsessed with a level playing field in STEM but not obsessed with a 50/50 ratio.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Because it's hard to tell who is going to make the next big leap. Losing 25% of the top brain power because we cannot be bothered to organise crèches seems shortsighted https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt
bobwaycott 8y ago
Who is suggesting there needs to be as many women as men in STEM?
oliwarner 8y ago
I think it's more that it would be the natural state if not for the ingrained social factors that disadvantage, dissuade and outright remove women from those careers. And that's important because it means a portion of the best brains are dropping out the mix, largely against their will.

tomp 8y ago

Because men and women are equal (so there's no difference whether a scientist is a man or a woman) /s

chimpburger 8y ago

For the same reason its important for there to be as many women in mining, oil rigging, heavy industry, and forestry.

monochromatic 8y ago
Don’t forget garbage collection and janitorial.
jriot 8y ago
Except there isn't.
phil248 8y ago
Are you being facetious? Obviously labor intensive work does not reap the same benefits from diversity of perspectives as scientific or creative fields.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chimpburger 8y ago
  Are you being facetious? How does science benefit from a diversity of genitalia? I'm not saying women should or shouldn't do this or that.. but the irrational compulsion to force equity between the sexes is stupid. Providing equal opportunity is good. Forcing equal outcome is evil.
  - phil248 8y ago
    I believe what I said was that science benefits from a diversity of "perspectives". But go on, rant against those straw men if it makes you feel better.
    - chimpburger 8y ago
      Gender quota != diversity of perspective
- tomp 8y ago
  You haven't explained how diversity of sex/gender contributes to diversity of perspectives. Also, are you happy to hire white nationalists and racists in the name of "diversity of perspective"? If not, then you're not being honest in your argument...

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I don't personally think it's necessarily important for there to be "as many women in STEM as men." But I do think those women who want to be there shouldn't be de facto run out by sexist practices. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I don't self identify as a feminist. But, post divorce, I've found that sexism has been a real issue in establishing an adequate income to support myself and my sons. So I think society still has work to do. It's very problematic to deny people a means to support themselves and then act like their poverty is due to laziness or the like. That kind of "fuck you" has been known to foment bloody revolution.

qaq 8y ago
Do you think a stay home dad with equal employment gap would have an easier time rejoining a workforce ?
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I have no idea. But I'm willing to guess he faces lower odds of being asked for a date by senior personnel in the better-paid department he would like to work in, thereby de facto closing doors in my face.
  - qaq 8y ago
    I am not trying to argue sexism/bias does not exist but from my experience any gaps in employment are a flag used to filter out candidates so in this particular scenario that might be the main problem to overcome.
  - bitL 8y ago
    That's super disgusting if that happened to you :( Maybe at some point we need to stop interacting in person completely and instead use gender-less avatars with their own voices so that we can bypass both sexual harassment as well as trying to land better positions by our own physical attractiveness.
- bobwaycott 8y ago

Aloha 8y ago

Because I think it's the only way we have to measure that there are no cultural barriers for women entering STEM professions. I've often theorized that much of the widely talked about pay gap has to do with either professions that women often wish to work in - or that society steers them to - but I dont know enough to know if its personal preference, or sociocultural bias driving personal preference. In the end, pay equality and open doors are important things, and is something we as a society should work on.

User23 8y ago
Actually, women are favored for tenure track STEM jobs: https://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/study-women-favored-for-stem-tenure-track-jobs/ https://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/study-women-f... So yes, there is sexism in academic STEM hiring: 2:1 in favor of women.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago

Start by not setting up strawman arguments for your conversation partners if you're interested in getting a real answer.

newnewpdro 8y ago

It's not, there's no reason to expect there to be as many women in the workforce as there are men in general. There's an obvious asymmetry which won't go away until men start giving birth. The rational debate is generally surrounding equal opportunity and compensation. Of course there are always going to be quacks pushing the debate in irrational directions however, and it's a trendy topic at the moment.

gboudrias 8y ago

The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. Science as a whole should strive to be as unbiased as possible, as that's the closest we can get to objectivity. The same logic applies to businesses, to reduce the risk of making mistakes that come with echo chambers.

tomp 8y ago
Is reducing bias the most important goal? (Definitely not for me. Life today is much better than it was 50 years ago in communist Yugoslavia, despite higher inequality and bias, due to progress in science and business.)
- kevincrane 8y ago
  Imagine how much more progress we could have had in science and business if we didn't de facto force out so many possible candidates who were interested in the field after they had their first kid.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
zeroname 8y ago
> The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. That's only true if all biases cancel each other out perfectly.
- jfrankamp 8y ago
  No, because this isn't a binary result. If group a and b both have bias 1, that bias won't be cancelled. But if they differ on bias 2, the combined group has less bias than a or b while not having 'cancelled all biases perfectly'. Perfection is a false goal while 'lower risk' is attainable and worthwhile.

com2kid 8y ago

Let's say we live in a world (or small town) where there are only 16 software developers, 8 men, 8 women. 4 of the women are amazing top notch engineers, and so are 4 of the men. The other 4 men and 4 women are pretty good, but not nearly as good as the top developers. If a company needs to hire 10 people, and they hire men, they will not be able to fill their entire hiring need. Obviously a silly policy, and it leaves a lot of good talent on the table. So instead, the company hires the best it can. 4 amazing women 4 amazing men 1 average woman 1 average man That is an optimal team given the local talent! But now let's have the company put in some sexist work place policies. Half the woman leave. Now the company is down to 2 amazing women 4 amazing men 1 average woman 1 average man to make up for lost numbers, the company is going to have to hire talent that is not as good as the talent that left! The tl;dr is that discriminatory policies artificially limit the labor pool, reducing the overall efficiency of a company (and the economy of a nation as a whole if looked at broadly enough).

_ta23 8y ago
Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50? The other thing is that the labor pool is already too large, lies from the industry notwithstanding.
- com2kid 8y ago
  > Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50? Discussions about quotas are separate from discussions about how discriminatory practices limit hiring pools, and how discriminatory workplace environments decrease the overall level of talent at an organization. (For what it is worth, the same reasoning being discussed here is why professional sports teams figured out long ago that racism was bad for business.) Mathematically, if there is a labor shortage, then cutting out part of the hiring pool based on criteria that are not correlated with the qualifications of candidates, will always result in worse hiring decisions being made. If there is a surplus of talented labor then whoever is doing the hiring can be pretty much as nasty as they want to be and still form a team of pretty good caliber.

redditmigrant 8y ago

If you agree to the basic principle that scientific ability and thought is equally prevalent amongst men and women, having fewer women scientists means we are not getting and developing the best scientific minds. Having as many women as men also means a you girl doesnt think science is for boys only which again means we potentially miss out on good/great scientific minds purely because they self-select out. So if you are in favor of STEM getting the best STEM minds, its important for STEM fields to reflect that STEM is for everyone. Having as many women as men is a step in that direction.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
We are not getting and developing the best scientific minds anyway. Not by a long way.
topmonk 8y ago
IQ tests show there are a greater number of men with very high IQs than women, and scientific ability highly correlates with IQ, so your “basic principle” doesn't hold muster.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  Do you have a source for this? How can we be reasonably certain IQ assessments aren't inherently gender-biased? Is IQ directly-correlated to scientific contribution? Richard Feynman's IQ was famously average though his scientific contributions to society were most certainly not.
  - topmonk 8y ago
    http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students... Richard Feynman is the exception that proves the rule.

perfmode 8y ago

It’s important to minimize barriers to participation.

dgzl 8y ago

From what I understand, if you mix women and men in the workplace then competition between employees goes up, for obvious reasons.

nuna 8y ago

you definitely sound it... its not so much about having the same number as it is about providing the same opportunities. If new moms had the same support, be it from family members and their communities, they would be less likely to leave their positions. Some things that would help in my opinion as a mother: affordable and accessible day care including back up care, at least 12 months maternity leave, flexible work arrangements (time and place), PTO (imagine both parents only have 2 weeks to spend with their kids outside of weekends), extended school and camp programs, affordability of all. I went back to work when babe was 4 months. I have only 2 weeks PTO, there inst even a Christmas shut down, I have no family in the area, the daycare centers around me have 1 year waiting lists and are over $2500/month. I am underpaid. My work is flexible thankfully. I don't blame women who quit.

belorn 8y ago
Sweden made a government report on the teaching profession a few years ago and just like male dominated professions they found that the minority gender, men in this case, left the profession in a significant higher rate in ever stage from when they are a student to being a stable employee for decades. While the study did not look at newly parents, I would make the guess a similar effect but likely smaller since day care is paid by the state in Sweden. I like common theories in order to explain similar data, so what theory can we make in order to explain why being a minority gender, for example women in science and men in the teaching profession, both tend to leave their positions in greater rate than the majority gender? A lack of support from family members and communities? I find that possible but a bit grim given how universal gender segregation is with about 90% of all employed here in Sweden.
- nuna 8y ago
  Interesting, whatever it is society has changed and we need to re-evaluate our culture, community and policies to accommodate

alkibiades 8y ago

as long as there isn’t then people will blindly look at the percentages and say it must be discrimination that causes the disparity

thomasmeeks 8y ago

The answer is a quick Google search away, diversity increases innovation: https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovation https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovati... If you don't agree with that, I'd love to hear why, and why the related studies are false. Can start with this one, which is the first result: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685.8132&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685... There's quite the bibliography to pour through there, though, if you really want to shatter the science behind why diversity is a good thing. Good luck!

roenxi 8y ago
The study you linked has nothing to do with gender or diversity w.r.t. minorities. It's subject is economic geography. We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women. The same logic applies to minorities as well, so we can be confident that any process calibrated to finding the best person for the job is going to turn up a diverse workforce. However, once policies designed to enforce diversity come in to play, that correlation will be broken and you just have a sexist/racist/whatever hiring system.
- horistat 8y ago
  > We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women No, that's a false statement. We cannot remotely think that because it's completely wrong. The percentage of population of a gender has nothing remotely to do with the percentage of women qualified for any particular job.
- vixen99 8y ago
  No, we can't be 'pretty confident'. Sometimes the 'best' don't want to do the job. 90% of nurses are female (in Sweden where gender equality is a top priority). What would be the motivation to induce or somehow encourage males to take up a career for which they clearly have no particular enthusiasm. I wonder how many males harbour a secret desire to be a nurse but are discouraged by societal norms? Need some amazing evidence for that one.

devwastaken 8y ago

Because humans find reasons to look down on other 'groups' when they know that group is underrepresented, and therefore tergetable. Same as how people will talk shit about others and get reinforcement for it, until that person actually walks in. And because professional careers are a necessary path if we wish to have a 1st world where choice is possible. Without choice, others are deciding what you can do with your life. That's generally what patriarchy refers to, in that women are treated by, overwhelmingly men, who are in positions of power and use that power in a way to suppress that choice. It's not that they do this explicitly because they hate women, many do think that women are just inferior, but many are also making highly calculative reasons. It's a chicken and egg problem. But if we are to say we believe in morality, then it is many times necessary to overcome that problem by force of public acts. Wether it's effective is highly circumstancial.

everdev 8y ago

Equality of outcome is a fool's errand and a quick path to authoritarianism. What we need is equality of opportunity. We don't need to even strive for a 50/50 M/F split in STEM, parenting, dance, healthcare, martial arts, etc. for everything we do in society. The majority of men and women might have very different interests and we want people doing what they're interested in and what gives them joy, not pushing them to do something the majority of their gender isn't usually interested in. But, when it's not close to a 50/50 split it's fair to ask why. Are men and women being given the same opportunity to join and be successful? If it's because men and women on average are different then nothing is wrong. But if it's because men aren't hiring women because of a bias then something is wrong. And historically we've been willing to give special treatment to those who are underrepresented to help correct past biases. So, yes the pendulum might swing from a bias to a quota before it goes back to equality. We see this in college admissions and people are starting to want to swing it back to equality which is fine once the initial biases in the system become rare enough that striving for diversity becomes the biggest bias in the system. Of course this is very difficult to measure and is largely influenced by culture and wether you've historically received preferential or biased treatment.

40acres 8y ago
Equality of opportunity over equality of outcome is such a contrived argument. Equality of opportunity is arguably harder as it implies a just society. What are you willing to give for equality of opportunity? Higher taxes? More liberal zoning? Desegregated busing? Affirmative Action?
- everdev 8y ago
  Equality of outcome means an external force like the government will step in to correct a situation such that person A gets the same results as person B. That can be income, job opportunities, taxes, etc. and it quickly disincentivizes hard work because the desired outcome has already been decided before you start. For a less sensitive example, imagine how hard football teams would practice if the NFL wanted the equality of outcome with each team winning the Super Bowl every 32 years. The worse my team is the harder the league has to try to make my team win which is great for me but bad for competition. And if I just won, I have no reason to try because the league doesn't want me to keep winning and will do whatever it takes to stop me from hogging all the trophies. Equality of opportunity means an external force will step in to correct a situation to ensure that person A and person B are playing by the same rules. Back to the OC, we should be obsessed with a level playing field in STEM but not obsessed with a 50/50 ratio.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

Because it's hard to tell who is going to make the next big leap. Losing 25% of the top brain power because we cannot be bothered to organise crèches seems shortsighted https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt

bobwaycott 8y ago

Who is suggesting there needs to be as many women as men in STEM?

oliwarner 8y ago

I think it's more that it would be the natural state if not for the ingrained social factors that disadvantage, dissuade and outright remove women from those careers. And that's important because it means a portion of the best brains are dropping out the mix, largely against their will.